Often when trying to delete files, we may come across some files that simply refuse to get deleted. When we make an attempt to delete these files, Windows shows errors like – “This file is in use by a process” or “This file is locked”. Usually restarting Windows and trying to delete these files works, but some of these files are locked even after rebooting the PC.
In situations like these we need special software to get rid of these stubborn files. For removing such files, we can use dErase which is a free Windows application for forcibly deleting files that otherwise show a resistance against file deletion. This same tool also offers secure deletion features using which we can delete files in such a way that they cannot be later recovered even by professional data recovery software.
In its user interface we can find two set of options. The first option allows you to overwrite free space on any partition that you can access through Windows File Manager. The free space is the hard disc drive space that is available for any new data, however this free space may contain data from any older files that have already been deleted. Using this option, we can overwrite all of this free space making sure that any remnants of older deleted files are completely gone and cannot be recovered by anyone at any time later.
The second option allows you to remove any selected files or folders. It can overwrite these files before removing them. From a dropdown listbox we can select for how many times the files are overwritten with random data. The lowest overwrite allowed is 1 pass which means that the files will be overwritten three times.
dErase is a portable program for Windows and can be very useful for deleting stubborn files as well as securely erasing files in order to intentionally make them irrecoverable.
You can download dErase from https://www.d7xtech.com/free-software/derase/.